Silas Lyons: Retracing an editor's path to Redding

I woke up early on a recent Friday and headed out for a short walk on the beach.

We had just wrapped up several days of meetings outside Ventura, and I was dreading the long drive back to Redding.

As I walked, I found myself wondering about Paul Bodenhamer.

For some of you who've been with us the longest, that name will trigger instant recognition. Here's the story.

It was 1938, 75 years ago this year, and construction of Shasta Dam was just getting under way. The country was still suffering from the Great Depression.

Bodenhamer was managing editor of the Ventura County Star-Free Press. It was the larger of the three papers owned by the John P. Scripps Newspaper Group, which was just barely a "group," Most of what I know about that period comes from an account written in 1978 to celebrate JPSN's 50th year.

In any case, Bodenhamer was summoned that summer to a hotel room in downtown Ventura, along with another young executive — Harry Bostwick Jr., business manager of Scripps' Santa Paula Chronicle.

There a deceptively young man, still a few years shy of his 30th birthday, met them. He was John P. Scripps.

Scripps had something to prove, and not because of his youth. He was in the final months of losing a newspaper war he had provoked by creating a daily in Santa Ana, and it had been a very painful and very public fight. Bodenhamer had spent a year at that operation before it closed, so he knew the failure well.

But Scripps already was thinking about the next project. He and business partner Roy Pinkerton, 27 years his senior and founder of the Ventura County Star, had been speaking with a commercial printer named Tom Cumbow who recently had moved down from Redding. Cumbow had convinced them that despite a thicket of competition from the Independent, the Searchlight, the Courier-Free Press and several weeklies, the community was about to grow and would support a new paper.

As I walked along the strand, I thought about what must have been going through Bodenhamer's head as he prepared to make the same trip north from Ventura to Redding. He'd be taking along an eclectic mess of borrowed type and a tiny budget, along with the hopes and aspirations of a company that could ill afford to lose another fight. It was a pretty fearless thing to do.

After that first trip, he and Bostwick went back with good news for their boss: Redding was doable. In fact, they believed that they could establish a regular circulation of 2,500 daily copies.

The painful lessons of Santa Ana were still fresh. Many years later, Scripps' son Paul K. Scripps wrote that it was that failure that determined the entire strategy in Redding.

"At that crucial juncture, when the flickering torch of JPSN hopes and pride passed from the dying Journal to the tiny ‘crawl, walk, run' style Redding operation, the flame caught and soon burned brightly," Paul Scripps wrote. "JPSN was back on the pathway toward growth and success."

Driving north later that day, I passed by much of that later growth. We drove through San Luis Obispo, where for half a century JPSN owned what was then the Telegram-Tribune, and Morro Bay (the Sun-Bulletin). North on Highway 101 we passed the turnoff to the Valley, and the Tulare Advance-Register. Above Salinas, we passed near the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian, which under JPSN won the 1956 Pulitzer for public service. Just north, Felton and Scotts Valley, home of two weeklies.

To this day, we carry the Scripps name.

People frequently ask me if we're going to make it, with all the changes happening in our business. Can we compete?

I think of Paul Bodenhamer, four editors ago. I think of him showing up in town, rolling up his sleeves and trusting his colleagues, his instincts and his new neighbors. I like to think as he was traveling north almost 75 years ago, he was feeling as I do today.

This is going to work. And it's going to be good.

Reach Editor Silas Lyons at 225-8210 or slyons@redding.com. He's on Facebook and Instagram, and on Twitter @silaslyons_RS.